When It Becomes Everything
by Freakish Lemon
Summary: Suzie wondered, not for the first time, if she had finally gone mad...


Suzie wondered, not for the first time, if she had finally gone mad. It'd be easy enough to do, she reasoned, looking around. He'd said that it needed work, but she hadn't counted on her new workplace looking like every science fiction movie ever had exploded underneath Roald Dahl Plas. She glanced over at her new boss. The grin he was sporting was mildly worrying.

"This is the Hub." Jack Harkness grinned all the more widely. Suzie snorted.

"More like the Batcave's retarded younger brother," she muttered, eyeing the birdcage floating around in one of the numerous grungy-looking pools of water.

"Now, now, play nice Miss Costello. She's your home away from home from now on."

"Oh, really?"

"Unfortunately. Or not." The leer he threw in her direction was positively filthy, but Suzie didn't entirely mind. Shrugging, Jack started up the stairs to what appeared to be the main area of the Hub, continuing the conversation. "Torchwood's pretty much an all day job. All night job most of the time, too. We're a bit understaffed at the moment."

"All day and all night? People must be lining up for this job." The railing wobbled a little under Suzie's hand and she wondered how long this place had been empty. "Maybe I should quit now and give someone else a shot."

The thing about Jack Harkness' abrupt about-face is that, although he hardly seemed to move, that ridiculous coat of his takes a while to catch up. Suzie watched as the hem of it arced through the air before taking a step back so that she could actually tilt her head back up to look him in the eyes. The man had no notion of personal space.

And he seemed to communicate mainly through varying grins. This one was smug.

"Suzie Costello, this is the one job that you'll _never_ quit."

**

"Understaffed" had been an understatement.

A week after she had managed to clear off the work benches in the corner she claimed just off the main area, Suzie Costello met Toshiko Sato, _the_ _only_ _other_ Torchwood employee.

"Make friends," Jack had gleefully shouted as he all but tossed the flustered Japanese woman at Suzie. Suzie had herself a good look at this newcomer as the woman recovered. Despite her timid and anxious stance, she was quick to regain her footing and even threw a scowl at Jack as he jogged up to his office to answer the ringing phone.

"Suzie Costello." She wiped her hand on her work apron before offering it to Toshiko. Toshiko glanced at it briefly before clasping it lightly.

"Toshiko Sato." She paused. "But everybody calls me Tosh."

Suzie almost couldn't hear her over the Hub's usual noises, but she nodded and half-turned back to her work. She frowned down at the gadget- a cross between an eggbeater and a curling iron, but kept spurting out some kind of mechanical lubricant every time she held it up vertically – before continuing the conversation.

"So, what are you here for Tosh? You don't look like the type to get mixed up with that nutjob." She gestured towards Jack's office with her chin.

"Oh, um… he said he needed someone for the computers. And, well, I've always been good with computers."

"Thank fucking _god_."

"Oh?"

"He wanted me familiarize myself with the system yesterday and it doesn't make a bit of sense. And I've done a fair bit of hacking- messing about with university attendance, pranks, that sort of thing- but there's no way I can make _that_ into something useable."

Suzie noted that Tosh stood up a bit straighter when she finished. Confident in her abilities then. Good. Suzie may not have been working here long, but even she knew that anyone unsure of their abilities wouldn't make it.

"So… what do you do then?" Tosh asked tentatively.

"Engineering. Sort of. I take all this crazy shit apart and see if I can figure out what it does. If I can, I rebuild it into something we can actually use." Suzie kicked the box of unknown, but apparently harmless, alien gizmos at her feet. "Weapons, scanners, whatever. I'm hoping for an alien coffee maker."

"We don't have a coffee maker?"

"Well, there's a machine upstairs. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Jack's already managed to set it on fire. Frankly, we're better off running out to Starbucks." Suzie grabbed her welding mask and grinned as she lit the torch. "Welcome to Torchwood."

**

Suzie didn't question it when Jack ran off on his errands and Tosh never questioned anything. They just kept themselves busy while he was gone and hoped that nothing big came through the Rift. Jack called Tosh once at the start of his trip to London to have her perform some of her CCTV magic.

"Poor guy lost his fiancé," Tosh mumbled, fingers flying across the keyboard. Suzie peered over her shoulder.

"Another one falls to the alien scourge," Suzie chuckled darkly into her mug of… something that vaguely resembled coffee. She was starting to wonder if that coffee machine was sentient and wanted revenge.

"It's not funny, Suzie."

"Whatever." She shrugged. "You think Jack's going to recruit him? He's been going on about getting a medic in here."

"I don't know." Tosh was already turning back to her coding project. She was attempting to make a program to search all of the major government databases in the UK. Suzie wasn't sure if she was jealous or impressed.

"Wouldn't mind him round the office, though. He's got a nice arse."

"Suzie!"

"What? He does." Suzie smirked as Tosh's eyes slid back to the camera feed to check out the doctor. "Maybe you could help him out with those lonely nights, Tosh."

Suzie nudged Tosh in the ribs with her elbow and laughed at other woman's blush all the way back to her work station.

**

Owen Harper's first day on the job, Suzie noted, started out very boring. He was polite and distant and proper and utterly professional until late in the evening when his first alien autopsy exploded in his face. Suzie laughed loudly along with Jack, and Tosh tried not to giggle as she offered to help clean up the autopsy room. Owen just stood there, swearing and trying to spit out alien guts.

Later, Jack asked Suzie what she thought.

"Not sure. We'll see how he deals with tomorrow's mess." Jack nods, and Suzie watched as Tosh tried to help Owen get the innards out of his hair. She tilted her head to one side. She could practically taste the crush Tosh was working on down there.

"Reckon Tosh likes him though," she said, grinning up at her boss. Jack had laughed and offered her a share of the leftover pizza lurking in the fridge.

**

Suzie was glad that Torchwood seemed to ignore all normal business practices. She was only five months into the job and, anywhere else, she'd be facing the mother load of all harassment lawsuits. She'd slept with Jack in those first few weeks, figuring that he was determined to sleep with everyone and she might as well do it sooner rather than later, and she'd been shagging Owen regularly for the past month.

Suzie took another swig of her beer before Tosh staggered over. She was openly smiling, which was rare these days, and she was apparently too full of Christmas cheer and brandy to give a damn about anything. Suzie laughed into Tosh's sloppy kiss and held the mistletoe up for her.

**

Tosh always had her PDA on her. It was full of her lists and ideas, which were always very detailed because she'd actually stop and think about them before writing them down. Because she was such a technogeek, she never misplaced it.

Owen had clipboards. The ones in the autopsy room were full of medical reports and alien autopsy findings and forms for when they themselves turned up injured. The ones piled up on his desk were full of admin and wild theories about the Weevils origins and his more impressive video game scores. It was all surprisingly neat for a man that came in half-drunk and/or hung over most of the time.

Jack's desk, while not clean by any stretch of the imagination, was somewhat coded by colored folders.

Suzie swore as sparks from an Arkan fuel converter caught her forest of post-its on fire again.

**

"Apparently," Jack announced, as Tosh, Owen, and Suzie stumbled into work, "When you adopt a pterodactyl, they throw in a handsome stalker for free!"

"Sir, I would appreciate it if we could keep the harassment down to a minimum. It is only my first day."

A young man in a well cut suit descended the rickety catwalk stairs, balancing a silver tray of steaming mugs. It took Suzie a moment before she recognized that this was, indeed, Jack's young stalker from Torchwood London. She then had three thoughts so quickly in succession that she almost gave herself whiplash.

What's-his-name Jones cleaned up well.

Where the hell did he find a silver tray?

Those mugs were filled with coffee.

"You have coffee," Suzie stated dumbly.

"I do," Jones said with a small smile, handing over one mug dutifully. Suzie looked down at it. It looked like coffee. She sniffed it. It certainly smelled like coffee. It definitely burned like coffee when she spilled some on her hand as she ducked beneath the low flying pterodactyl. She glanced around at the others, who were all performing similar mental checklists with their mugs. Except for Jack, who was leaning against Tosh's workstation and grinning expectantly.

Suzie took a sip.

"Wow" was all she could get out before she realized that the pterodactyl's flight had stirred up enough wind to dislodge everything that wasn't nailed down at her workstation. She spent the rest of the morning fishing scraps of paper and wayward post-its out of the walkway grills and drains.

Suzie didn't respond to Jack's repeated questions of "Can we keep him?" (honestly, sometimes that man was such a _child_) until later that afternoon when Jones reemerged from the Hub's infamous Archives carrying a large white board. She watched as he set it up next to her main work bench, within arm's reach of course. He arranged a few different colored markers along the ridge on the bottom before helping her gather the last of her notes.

"I figure it'll be less prone to escape than these are." He handed over his handful of paper as he said this. "I'm about to put on another pot of coffee. Would you like some?"

"JACK!" Suzie yelled up to his office.

"Yes, Suzie darling?" Jack emerged from his office with a skip in his step and smile in his voice and, if Suzie didn't think that this Welsh boy's coffee couldn't somehow bring about world peace, she'd be annoyed with her boss' cheerful attitude.

"We can keep him."

**

Suzie couldn't remember if she'd worked like this before Torchwood or if this whole mess was unraveling her thought processes. She dimly remembered a time when she was able to sit down and organize her thoughts. Was it back in university? When she was a child? She didn't know any more and, really, what did it matter when she'd probably be hauling some half-melted alien junk out of the wet mud of the Welsh countryside in a few hours?

Suzie heard more than felt herself recap a whiteboard marker with just her right hand. That hand had taken to writing out the little half-formed flits of thought that buzzed through her sleep-deprived, over-caffeinated brain before she was even aware she was actually thinking them. Sometimes this was a good thing. Last week she'd had a break-through with a faulty meison energy scanner only to swear profusely when she realized she'd forgotten what it was. It was only just before she left for the night when she realized that it had been staring her in the face from the white board all day. Owen had laughed at her before demanding she leave it alone and come out for a drink.

Of course, there was also the fact that sometimes what she wrote down made no sense and she couldn't remember why she'd been thinking that. Ianto had tilted his head curiously at "thing with red on vacuum readings," mouthing the words silently as his eyebrows did that adorable crinkling thing she'd taken to teasing him about. He'd shaken his head, placed her coffee just out of reach of her elbow, and suggested that maybe she take a break, even if only to sort out the board.

She'd frowned at that, but did it anyway. The others had apparently decided that her breaks were also theirs and came down to watch her decipher her scribblings. They didn't all always come down together. Sometimes Tosh would come down alone to bounce ideas off of her, which Suzie didn't mind at all because although she was often annoyed with Tosh's willingness to put up with shit, she was rather brilliant. Sometimes Jack would drag Owen away from his corpses to try and muddle through some truly spectacularly bad handwriting. Ianto never spoke when he stopped to watch, even when he was with the others. He just took it all in.

She'd have to keep an eye on that one. Suzie smacked the small generator she'd been working on against the workbench to try and loosen a bolt. Ianto Jones may play his part well and not-so-secretly flirt with the captain and handle them all like bratty children when they needed it and make the best god damn coffee on the planet, but there was something off about his eyes.

Suzie acknowledged Tosh and Owen's approaching footsteps with a wave without looking up from her work. They were too old, Ianto's eyes. Didn't belong in his face. He was what, twenty three? Twenty five maybe?

"You really think so?"

Suzie blinked at the sound of Toshiko's voice and wondered when the hell she'd managed to learn to read minds. She looked up at her co-workers and Owen gestured to her theory board.

"Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised."

_Ianto = v. efficient. Robot?_

Suzie watched as Tosh moved forward, picked up a marker, considered for a moment, then wrote in small neat lettering:

_Extensive training at a secret butler academy._

She nodded once, recapped the marker and stepped back. Once Tosh had cleared the small area, Owen reached over and scribbled _Clone_.

"Oi! Jack! Teaboy! Get down here a minute!" Suzie thought about how Jack's boots made more noise than they should bounding down the stairs like that. If she didn't, she was going to start laughing and she wasn't sure she would be able to stop.

Jack's laugh was loud and echoed back up to the pterodactyl nest, where Myfanwy (Ianto had named her) screeched at the noise. He turned to his quiet companion with an obscenely bright smile on his face. Suzie knew that if she were normal she'd feel embarrassed about this.

"What do you think, Ianto?" Jack beamed. Suzie was both pleased and puzzled to see that Ianto's customary smirk was trying to dissolve into a genuine grin.

"Well," he replied as deadpan as he could muster, "If I _were_ a robot, Torchwood would be the last place I'd go."

"Ah," interjected Owen, "But that makes it the perfect place to hide, Jonesie. You're twisty and sneaky enough to use that kind of logic."

"In the interest of national security," Jack's wink was obvious, "I do believe I'm going to have to check you for seams, Ianto Jones."

For a moment, Suzie watched as Jack and Ianto caught each other's glances and wondered why no one else seemed to notice that they were having sex with their eyes right there. Then Jack turned away, still smiling, and scrawled _Psychic – reads our minds for what we need_ under the list on the white board.

Suzie finally let herself laugh out loud at the absurdity of the whole situation when the Rift alarm sounded and the group went their separate ways to deal with a new and intriguing alien threat.

When Suzie came into work next morning, the Ianto theories had been wiped from her board. There was a box drawn in the upper right hand corner. The top of the box read _Owen's Secret Hobbies_ in Jack's handwriting.

**

It became a proper game eventually. Someone would slap a prompt up there - Jack's home planet, Weevil names, a print out of a stupid CCTV moment – and each of the others would filter down to Suzie's corner to scribble out their response. Whoever had the best response won the game, and the one with the most wins by the end of the week (or whenever the Rift let them have some down time) would get a pint on the team or the left over pizza to take home or just a smidge of extra funding for their research projects.

Suzie noted that Ianto never really seemed to participate in the game itself, but she reveled in the madness of his involvement. He perpetuated the jokes, turned them in on themselves until they made up a silly little world all of Torchwood's own. He'd make a quip about Owen's nonexistent painted hermit crab colony and ask about Tosh's nonexistent vegetable garden and leave a postcard from Columbia (where he apparently teleported to buy their coffee beans) on her desk on rainy mornings and ask Jack if he needed those guitar strings for his nonexistent guitar by the end of the week.

If Suzie stopped to think about it, which she never really did, she'd think that Ianto was holding himself back by not playing their game properly and wonder about that little frown he tried to hide whenever the lights flickered, but the Hub was constantly falling apart and aliens were always about to invade and they were all a bit mad anyway. She supposed it didn't really matter.

**

_Instruments Tosh knows how to play_

_Harp, she's got the wrists for it ;) –Jack_

_Tuba! [badly photoshopped picture of Tosh with marching band hat on]- Owen_

_Electric guitar. Tosh is secretly a rock star. – Suzie_

(Tosh found a tin whistle on her keyboard that evening after Owen and Suzie had gone home.)

**

"Oh bollocks!" Suzie laughed at her team mate's exclamation.

"Tosh! Language!" She rang her hair out over a railing. It was pissing down outside and there had been five Weevils loose all over town. Of _course_ the damn things wanted to come out and play in the rain.

"Sorry." Suzie rolled her eyes, turning to flick the still wet ends at Jack, who looked to be the driest out of all of them. "It's just that that last Weevil snagged the sleeve of my coat and I really liked this one."

"Just buy a new one, Tosh," Owen said around the end of a pencil, spinning in his chair.

"Well, I'm going to have to," Tosh snapped, grumpily. "That's the third good coat this month."

"I could have a look at it." Suzie wondered if Ianto didn't really have some kind of teleport on him. People didn't just appear with trays of coffee and biscuits like that.

"Really?" Everyone turned to the young man as he handed out their mugs.

"Of course. My father was a master tailor, after all."

Suzie laughed along with the others. She knew he was lying, they'd all read each others' files because they were bored and were told to, but she played along anyway. It was her response to Tosh's _Story behind Ianto's gorgeous suits_. It had been beaten out by Jack's answer about clothing fetishes and Owen's answer about secret butler cults, which she was still a bit miffed about. It was all a part of the game.

**

It had been a bad week. A bad month, even. The Rift finally seemed to be quieting down for a while, but it had been spitting out partially diffused bombs and more weevils and violent psychos from the past almost faster than they could contain them. There were too many casualties that they couldn't prevent, and too many injuries within the team itself for it to function properly.

Suzie sat down on their crappy old couch with a cup of tea heavily laced with something alcoholic and watched as her team mates tried to pull themselves together. Tosh's eyes were dull and sunken with lack of sleep and her two broken fingers prevented her from typing out her reports as fast as she would like. Owen limped down to the autopsy room to replace the plasters on his forehead, yawning. Ianto slouched as he tried to finish up everything for the night, too tired to stand up straight but too stubborn to admit that he was ready to drop at any moment.

Suzie groaned as she leaned back, suddenly aware of the bruises and scrapes and the tired ache in her bones. They all looked too young and too old and too worn out to be in this place. She wondered if she fared any better when their glances passed over her. Probably not.

She tilted her head up to look at Jack. He leaned on the railing of the catwalk over head, watching. Looking over them. Far enough away to hide his exhaustion and close enough to come running should they need him. Suzie was too tired to stop the small smile that crossed her lips.

Her eyes shifted down to her corner where the white board stood amongst the debris of her projects. Three days ago, Jack had prompted _The Meaning of Life_. Tosh had answered _42_ of course, finding it necessary to cement the fact that she was the biggest nerd here. Owen's answer, _sex_, had earned a chuckle and Ianto's rare participation with _coffee_ had garnered a chorus of amens. Suzie had waited, wondering if this was some kind of bizarre test for them.

Suzie heard Jack before she saw him climb down the catwalk stairs and make his way over to join her on the uncomfortable sofa. Owen shuffled up from his little kingdom to throw himself into his computer chair, grabbing his quickly cooling coffee and rolling the chair over to rummage in the pizza boxes that had been left on the coffee table. Ianto paused next to them, handing Tosh a cup of tea and passing Jack's mug over. Suzie looked back to her board.

"Did you ever answer it?" Owen asked, mouth full of cold pizza. He gestured towards her corner with the crust.

"No."

"Answer it now, Suzie dearest," Jack said, stretching an arm over her shoulders with exaggerated movement. Tosh turned to hear her answer and Ianto, surprisingly, didn't run off to keep their little world working. "What is the meaning of life?"

Suzie paused and wondered when this became normal, when pterodactyls and Weevils and guns and blood and love in the dark and adventure became everything. She wondered when everything she knew became so brutal and beautiful and so royally fucked up. She smiled into her tea cup, tired and cynical, but undeniably content with the hand she'd be dealt. Despite everything, she really loved this job.

"This is."

**

FIN


End file.
